Social Media

Newspaper is a Dead Medium (at Least at Shasta High)

Just as TechDirt's Mike Massnick, I was an editor in my high school journalism department in my youth, as well as the editor for an underground publication that served not just the highschool, but the region's BBS community. I imagine that if you were to poll a lot of the leading members of the blogosphere, you'd find quite a few folks that fall into both of those categories during their high school years.

Thus, it wasn't hard for me to identify with Massnicks observations based on a story he picked up about a high school principal who shut down the high school newspaper after being offended by an editorial regarding flagburning:

Shasta High published its last issue of the Volcano, the student newspaper, before the end of classes last week with an image on the front page of a student burning the American flag and an editorial inside defending the practice.

"The paper's done," said Milan Woollard, Shasta High principal. "There is not going to be a school newspaper next year."

Given the pervasiveness of blogging and social media in today's online world, Mike rightly muses what the point of this is, "as there's nothing to stop the students from taking the content, and putting it all online and not needing any stamp of approval from the school administration." He then goes on to muse for a few sentences on the value of even having a school newspaper in the first place.

As for my high school journalism experiences, I can say that they were infinitely more valuable than the experiences I had even in college. My own little underground publication began as far back as middle school, and continued its run up until my later years in high school, when other entreprenurial ventures took my attention.

Still, experiences in my high school journalism classes weren't valuable because of what I learned about publishing, but because of the adviser who served as a role model for instilling journalistic ethics and best practices. She also forced us into exploring what our personal strengths and talent assets were, and into finding ways that could best be applied towards journalism. She gave us the instinct to always be on the hunt for the hook and the story, and not be a passive observer of life, but a chronicler.

These are the more important tenants of journalism, as I see them. All the rules, business models, procedures, and even the ethics can change and shift with time and the various media one uses to practice their craft.

What needs to shift in high school journalism, then? Clearly we're moving more towards an online social media dominant future, so instead of teaching them the ability to run a form of journalism sure to be dead by the time they've graduated from college, how about we create curriculum that shows them how to successfully navigate the waters of social media. I've often heard the blogosphere described as a giant version of the high school cafeteria, with all the drama and infighting (hint: we call them bitchmemes, these days).

What I'm saying is that it shouldn't be too hard to adapt the material to modern life, and likely a great deal cheaper than paying to have a paper sent to press. If we're truly interested in taking our little Web 2.0 experiments to the mainstream, we need to be pushing to export our experience to the ones who will be running this joint in a few years.

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